Watson Lake Sign Post Forest

There’s really no place like home, and there is no way to better remember your roots than a visit to the Sign Post Forest in Canada.

Deep into the Yukon alongside the Alaska Highway, a collection of 65,000 signs have amassed over the last 70 years. The forest was founded in 1942 when a construction worker doing work on the highway brought his own sign to mark the distance to his hometown in Illinois. Since then, the tradition of leaving a sign behind has created a diverse collection from around the world.

As the forest has grown in signs, an adopt-a-post program has funded more space for mementos. By the time the forest turns 100 in 2042, there will undoubtedly be thousands of more signs, each displaying the hometown from one of the forest’s visitors. Following in the tradition of its nostalgic origin, a time capsule was placed in the Sign Post Forest in 1992 with the intent to open it in 2042. Even if the world radically changes in the next 50 years, the Sign Post Forest is a unique record of how towns and roads across the world once looked.